Wednesday, July 13, 2011

With the last of the Mixology Monday entries showing up yesterday, I set it to be my goal to finish this wrap up post today so I would not have it hovering over me as I set about to tie up loose odds and ends before I leave for New Orleans for Tales of the Cocktail on Tuesday morning. I am not sure whether I am more impressed with the number of style of beers or the ways that they were used. Below, I present drinks made with everything from fine Belgians to lowbrow macrobrews (my two drinks included in the latter category). Moreover, beer was used as a float, base, syrup, and liqueur, and poured in recipes as old as classic punches, as traditional as Micheladas, and as new as created in the last week. The only disappointment was that no one wrote a curmudgeonly post about the Boilermaker, although as Chuck Cowdery points out, most times that drink is served in a beer-back format, not as a Depth Charge one.

Note: the top beers (left to right) of each six pack relate to the first 3 posts, and the bottom row to posts 4 through 6 of each section. And yes, I do realize that these plastic rings are an ecological nightmare, but thematically fitting and perfectly safe in the electronic format.

• Lindsay of Mix it Up Cincinnati got her start with beer cocktails when she tasted Al Sotack's Appalachian Flip at Tales of the Cocktail last year. Here, she presents the Southern Magic using a pale ale as a float. Having mixed beer and apricot liqueur together like she has, the drink looks to be a winner.• I was second to post with a pair of beer cocktails created here in Boston, namely the Milwaukee Monk and the Coney Island Strongman. Both use Chartreuse, citrus, and Miller High Life in very different ways.• What impresses me most about Tiare's (of A Mountain of Crushed Ice) post is that she did it on the road for she is already in New Orleans as part of her pre-Tales of the Cocktail festivities. Being in New Orleans allowed her the opportunity to use favorite beer, Abita, in the New Orleans-Style Michelada. • DJ Hawaiian Shirt goes a little non-traditional using a dark Mexican beer for a Shandy called the Wahine Censor that he discovered on the Tiki Central Forums. • Scraps of Sips & Shots revisits one of the drinks created for the 50 Shots of America series, namely the North Carolina one – the Glazed Donut in honor of where Krispy Kreme was founded. A yeasty honey wheat beer is craftily used here to impart some of the donut's flavor.• Tempered Spirit's Ian Lauer pops his first Mixology Monday bottle cap here with the Honey Beer. Essentially, a Bee's Knees with a beer float, except Ian recommends using Dogfish Head's Midas Touch for its honey and herbal notes.

• Keith of the Speakista blog cooks up a stout beer syrup and figures out a variety of uses for it such as in the Happily Ever After. Keith finds that the syrup, besides adding sweetness, draws out fruit and chocolate notes from certain ingredients.• Nihil Utopia's Dagreb presents the Skip & Go Naked. Dagreb first alerted me to the name of this drink when he saw my MxMo 36 post and declared that the Dutch 75 was really the S&GN.• Mackenzie Wheeler offers up a pair of drinks on the Spirit of Imbibing blog. The Weizen Ungeheuer brings beer and smoky tea syrup together and the other, Red Tide Royal, is essentially a ginger Margarita lightened with a strawberry-flavored beer.• Beer cocktail evangelist Jacob Grier could not resist discussing one of his passions. Here, he presents a yet unnamed beer Tiki drink that looks rather delicious. Maui Brewing Company's Coconut Porter brings the concept together quite nicely.• Michael Dietch of A Dash of Bitters reworks his Seelbock submission for the Food 52 Competition into the drink he first wanted to make. Aventinus' Doppelbock puts the finishing touches on his beer translation of the classic Champagne one.• Felicia's Speakeasy's Amelia saves the expense of Champagne or even a $10 bottle of cava by making the PBR Mimosa. Actually sounds pretty good especially how the beer would add some crispness to the citrus, and at least she recommends using real juice (wait for it...)!

• Like Dietsch's Seelbock, Kennedy from the That's the Spirit blog presents the Beerbach and keeps true to the classic's form save for the sparkler's identity; in this case, he recommends a light lager.• Playing off the name of a Edna St. Millay poem, Elizabeth Dodwell of Mix'n'Sip site invents the Being Yueng and Green. Yet again, Green Chartreuse appears as a natural complement to beer, namely Yuengling Lager, along with some other spice, fruit, and floral ingredients.• Adam at the Inspired Imbibing blog mixes up sloe gin, Scotch, and grapefruit with a wheat beer to make the Wind-Up Bird. I have had a tasty beer and sloe gin cocktail before, so I have little doubts about Adam's assertion to its tastiness. However, with the sloe gin's red color, the drink reminds me more of a drinking bird toy (the ones with the red wicked head) than a wind-up one.• Kindred Cocktail's founder Dan Chadwick created the Choke Let Malt during Mixoloseum's Thursday Drink Night "Beer Cocktails" last week. Scotch and Cynar make a great pair, and the extra malt and botanical notes from a pale ale ties this drink together.• Erik Ellestad of the Savoy Stomp (it's still the Underhill Lounge to me, dammit!) levies some nautical history in rationalizing why a hop-infused whiskey drink would make a good beer substitute on a long voyage. Definitely, his drink, the Industrial Pale Fizz would keep a boatful of angry, thirsty Pilgrims well satiated. Postnote: Erik provided a link to part 2.• One of the best historical story telling blogs, the 12 Bottle Bar does not disappoint with the Brown Betty. Here, the drink is scaled down from the punch size recipe in the 19th century Oxford Night Caps and looks like a good, strong ale and Cognac-based drink.

• The Done Like Dundee, Gone Like Gandhi went there -- the Mimosa without Champagne or orange juice. With this month's theme, the use of Miller High Life "the Champagne of Beers" is not surprising, but the use of Tang powder is! AJR describes how the drink, the White Trash Mimosa, was put on the menu of Tonic at Quigley's Pharmacy in Washington D.C. with great success!• Ed of the Wordsmithing Pantagruel blog also created drinks during the Mixoloseum TDN: Beer event and describes a few of them with gorgeous photographic evidence. The Bruges Sling is one of them, and it uses a cherry Lambic to mesh with a variety of fruit and spice notes for a tall, refreshing cooler.• Another MxMo first timer, Colleen of the Tipsy Vixen blog presents a few drinks including the Skip & Go Naked that Dagreb described. One of the other two, an original called the Sangrichelada, is an interesting Bloody Mary-like concoction.• A Drink on the Rocks' Dennis Shafer pours out a pair of beertails. One of them, the Dutch Monk uses a beer syrup made out of a Belgium trippel to sweeten and flavor the Demerara rum-based drink, and the other, the Outlaw Czar, uses a tall pour of Old Rasputin Russian Imperial Stout in an orange-tinged delight.• Dave of the Barman Cometh takes the Imbibe Magazine cover drink, the Charentes Shrub, and brings it to life in his kitchen including the crafting of a pineapple-rosemary shrub. All that work is definitely worth the effort from what I gather, but I will have the chance to have David Delaney make this drink for me at a Tales of the Cocktail event next week (or I can visit him at the Citizen in Worcester).• Paul Clarke, besides running the show here on Mixology Monday, makes it his goal to get in his entry as close to midnight on Monday as possible. Paul pulls an unused recipe out of his hat, the Weissen Sour, that he gathered for his 60/30 posting marathon. The drink was created by Kevin Diedrich then of San Francisco's Burritt Room, and it pairs Bourbon, wheat beer, and citrus elements including marmalade into a tasty sounding tall drink.

• Instead of going the syrup route, Marc of A Drinker's Peace brews up (literally) his own beer liqueur and crafts the Beer Simple, Hop Complex with it. The end result is a drink in the style of an Old Fashioned.• Tacoma's 1022 South restaurant presents a drink that uses Unibroue's apple-flavored Éphémère called Running Up That Hill. It is an interpretation of Jay Kuehner's Cavale, and they will be serving it on Sunday for their pre-Tales of the Cocktail event.• Next up is a trilogy of posts made on the eGullet forum. First off is Jeff Meeker describing his recipe for the Michelada. I believe that the secret to his recipe is the use of a small amount of Maggi seasoning for a savory component in the drink.• Haresfur is our second eGullet contributors and presents a modification of Billy Dawson's Punch from David Wondrich's Punch book. Whether or not you have access to Haresfur's homebrew porter, the recipe looks like one to explore, although with the hot water aspect, perhaps not until summer is over. • For the hat-trick, Sunny&Rummy offers up the Flemish 75 he crafted at the TDN: Beer event last week. Instead of the funky Lindemans Gueuze Cuvée René he wanted to find, he ends up using an apple lambic bolstered by ginger, maple syrup, and brandy flavors.

Thanks again to the case and a quarter of you who submitted recipes to this event and to Paul Clarke for letting me host once more!

11 comments:

AH-HA! Thank you for knowing the cocktail I was referring to! For some reason I thought they were using Newcastle (granted...Tales tends to be a slightly hazy week), not Sierra Nevada, but now I do remember the bottle being Sierra Nevada. I couldn't find it in the Tales recipe book last year, so I'm happy to see it around.

Excellent topic and feedback! Coming from the beer side of the bar and being fond of cocktails and beer blends, I am amazed & amused by peoples reaction when beer cocktails are mentioned. Like anything we eat & drink its about balance and flavor! I've posted some beer cocktail recipes on my blog, and have many more ready to share (some were tweeted @chocolatestout & fb posts) http://roguechocolatestout.blogspot.com/2010/01/beer-cocktail-rogue-diplomat-gone-nuts.htmlCheers!

What a different wrap-up! very nice. I have as usual when i come down here turned abita beer into a life style and i don´t wanna think about how i shall survive a year without them later on...but there´s still another 15 days..

Dagreb, it's a drink that would be written up when there's a story the blogger needs to tell, more than a recipe that needs to be shared. The photo layout was something I thought about right after Paul Clarke okayed my idea a month or two ago. Fun with photoshop and .png format.

Lindsay, the Tales recipe book only has some of what goes on there. It was more helpful in previous years when it was printed in advanced and purchased there (came with a full day pass which is a deal they did a way with) so you could look up what recipe you were served at the seminar while drinking it.

Rogue, thanks! I will look around later for some more recipes. It would help if you had tags on the posts so I could click on a "recipes" tag.

Tiare, it's a pity you can't get Abita where you live. We can get some of the varieties up here in Boston. But at least the void in Sweden keeps you coming back to NOLA for Tales. I am still impressed that you made your drink and post while traveling!

who? what?

The euphemisms are getting a bit stale, suffice to say: four people in Boston -- two of whom are much more prolific writers than the other two (including the originator of this blog, who has no excuse apart from laziness) -- who drink and tell.

drink & tell: a boston cocktail book

A collection of drink recipes, techniques, and Boston bar recommendations from Frederic Yarm, one of the authors of the Cocktail Virgin Slut blog. Available at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and The Boston Shaker (on their shelves and via their webstore). Follow the buzz on D&T's Facebook fan page!